This is where the Infamous War Novel came in handy.

I’d tried writing and rewriting the damn thing for over a year, between school, family events and hanging out with friends, and after multiple failed attempts, I stumbled upon a brilliant idea — outlining!  Okay, I already knew about outlining thanks to my English classes, but bear with me for a moment here.

You see, in September of 1984, a new TV show premiered that changed the way audiences watched television, specifically action-heavy shows like police dramas.  Michael Mann’s Miami Vice was a game-changer for a lot of reasons, and not just because of the flashy clothes and the hot sports cars.  This was a show with gritty violence, dark storylines, subplots focusing on deeply personal issues…and one hell of a great soundtrack to go along with it all.

It’s par for the course now, but back then, putting a pop song in the background of a scene to amplify the dramatic nuances was a completely new thing for television.  Whole scenes would go by with little or no dialogue but tell a gripping story just the same.  The “Brother’s Keeper” episode in which Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” drives the entire scene is a key example of this.

I grokked to this linking of sound and image straight away, and went about reverse-engineering it to see how it could be used for the IWN.  What I came up with was a synergy of music and ideas, all linked by the main plot.  I already had a handful of songs in the back of my head that would inspire the scenes, having tested a few scenes early on just to see if I could do it.  I understood how three-act plot arcs worked, even if I hadn’t quite perfected it.  I put the two together, and made a playlist of songs and ideas that would create a story with flow, conflict and closure.  Thus Caught in the Game, the final version of the IWN was born.

The writing of the IWN helped get rid of some of that personal boredom, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from ditraction.  I think the reason why I was feeling this way was because, by the start of 1985, I was really itching to change myself.  I was finishing off my not-so-fantastic run of eighth grade, where I’d earned my one failing grade one semester. [In English, ironically enough.  I wasn’t doing any of the homework and rarely paid attention in class.  Again, it wasn’t that I was heading down a bad road, it was that I was completely fucking bored most of the time.]

 *

I remember one of the last dances they had for the end of the school year, everyone had semi-dressed up, and the deejay played all the latest hits.  They played Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, and, strangely enough, USA for Africa’s “We Are the World”.  Then they threw on Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, and all hell broke loose.  The Breakfast Club had just come out not that long before, and despite its R rating, I and everyone else in my class had gone to see it and deemed it the most awesome movie of all time.  That movie spoke to each and every one of us that year, and life made a little bit more sense because of it.

I remember feeling a sense of finality during those last few weeks of eighth grade.  A bunch of us were so excited to be heading up to high school.  We felt it was the turning point where we were finally escaping our childhood and moving on to bigger and better things.  The last four years of our primary education were in our sights; we could see that 1989 wasn’t a decade away, but just a short handful of years.

Musically, that’s when I’d made a decision to broaden my horizons.  I still loved listening to the early MTV years and the current run of pop and rock, but what seemed really far out and cool in 1982 now seemed a bit old hat, maybe a bit cheesy.  The synthetic sounds of new wave were wearing a bit thin, didn’t hold the shine and gloss it once gave.  There was more out there  — we knew there was more out there, just out of our grasp.  The pop stations were not evolving as frequently as they once did.  MTV was now firmly ensconced in their own brand of pop sheen and easily digestible hair metal.  Rock stations, while doing their best to stay current, were starting to morph into classic rock or hard rock stations, leaving the middle ground behind.  It was all about the instant gratification now.

That’s not to say I stopped listening to it.  I was still a fan of American Top 40 and still recorded my favorite songs off the radio.  In retrospect it’s hard to argue that there were a hell of a lot of great songs that came out in 1985.  I had at least a dozen or so ‘radio tapes’ of pop songs made by 1985 and would create at least a few dozen more up until 1987.  I even catalogued them on a well-worn steno notebook that I saved for years.*  And as much as I loved it, it was still lacking.  I wanted something a little more adventurous.

Cue the new generation of alternate programming: AOR.

Album Oriented Rock.  Not quite free-form, as that did not really exist as a viable programming format anymore.   AOR was its commercial cousin, the station that didn’t have a completely strict and narrow playlist, gave the deejays some freedom to choose a few songs during their shift, and most importantly, dug much deeper into a band’s discography.  One would be more inclined to hear Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying” instead of “Fool in the Rain” for the umpteenth time.

More to the point, sometimes you wouldn’t even hear pop or rock at all; some days you’d hear the recent generation of folk singers or Dylan’s latest iteration; something blues from Eric Clapton or Joan Armatrading.  You’d hear deep tracks from bands as disparate as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Camper Van Beethoven, and Graham Parker.  AOR appealed to me in an interesting way; it kind of felt like ‘grown up music’, the stuff you listen to after you’ve grown out of top 40 pop.  Or in other words, it was the stuff you listened to if you really wanted to be a serious music listener.

* – As you may well have guessed, I have since taken the track listing of nearly all these radio tapes and created mp3 mixes of them, using my digital collection.

We all go through that weird phase when we’re kids — you know the one, where we get that feeling that we don’t quite fit in, that we’re scared of our own individuality, even more scared of having it seen by others who are quick to judge us.  We do our best to fit in the best we can, in our own ways, to varying levels of success.  Some of us easily fit in anywhere and with anyone, we have a healthy sense of being in charge of ourselves.  Others don’t worry about it and take everything as it comes.  And some of us are all too aware of who we might be, but can’t quite find a niche to place ourselves in.

I’d say I was the third case, because from a relatively early age — probably first grade, come to think of it — I was aware that I wasn’t quite on the level with the other kids in my class.  Intellectually I was probably a year ahead (and I don’t mean that in an egotistical way — in retrospect I feel I should have been a year ahead, for reasons I’ll get into later).  Socially, maybe on the same level, maybe a few leagues behind.  There was also the name recognition — I was the son of a well-known local historian and reporter with three older sisters, so I already had an expectation to live up to.  I also joked that I could never get away with anything growing up, because my parents would find out before I even got home.  [This actually happened a few times in my teens.  News travels fast in a small town.]  So there I was, mid-80s, feeling just that bit out of place — getting along with almost anyone, irritating some and annoying others, a do-gooder that couldn’t get away with anything, an average-grade student who was expected to be better, who was easily influenced for good or ill, out of boredom and impatience.

Still, that didn’t stop me from being the go-to person when someone needed to talk music.  I still went to all the school dances and moved around on the floor like a total idiot to my favorite songs, and completely failed to get any slow dances (mostly my own damn fault for not asking in the first place).

So with that, and with a few years’ worth of MTV and radio in my brain, I was ready and rearing to go.  I started listening to American Top 40 on a frequent basis, taping songs onto ‘radio tapes’ that I could listen to at a later time.

Socially, I wasn’t quite sure where the hell I was, to be honest.  I floated from one group to another over the years.  Like most people, The kids I hung with in elementary school had long ago moved on.  New friendships upon hitting fifth grade and a new school, where I met up with other kids from different neighborhoods.  Then junior high (seventh and eighth grade) with even more new faces.

It was in seventh grade that I met up with one of my buddies that I’d spend the next few  years hanging with.  Kevin was a kid from Royalston, the small town north of us that we shared upper grades with.  He and I met basically because we were often one right after the other in homeroom and other classes.  We were both music nerds and, well, nerds in general, so we got on swimmingly.  We were both well-read in the MTV department and knew most of the popular songs out there in the mid-80s.

There were two other people I met that year that would leave an impression on me as well.  One was Scott, who I knew tangentially through a kid named Bobby who lived around the corner from us when I was younger.  Scott and I kind of knew each other in sixth grade through band, but by the next year we were hanging out now and again.  H ewas the one who decided we should become writers, and set about stealing random sheets of lined paper from the front of the class so we would write our stories.  It was during this time that I’d come up with a ‘what if there was a war in my home town’ story — started right about the same time Red Dawn came out, but actually inspired by the ongoing Cold War news of the day.*  Out of those study-hall writing sessions came what would eventually be called Caught in the Game, and more recently referred to as the Infamous War Novel — I’ll be referring to it as the IWN from here on in.

The third person was actually someone a grade ahead of me — Chris, who I quickly found was interested in music almost to the obsessive level I was.  We had no classes together, but we shared a couple of study halls and also helped with the junior high newspaper (such as it was).  He also had a hankering for the occasional story telling, writing one or two short stories that I still have in my files.  But as he was a year ahead, he’d vanish out of my sight for a couple of years until a fateful meet-up in early 1986.**

But…that’s pretty much my entire life up to that point.  Not muc to mention other than some good friends, and not much else to report in this small town of mine.  Hang out with the last few remaining kids from the neighborhood, that’s pretty much it.***  In a small town of about ten thousand people and nearly ten times as many trees, one made do with whatever was on hand back in those days.

By 1985, however, I was getting itchy.  At fourteen, I was at that age where I felt I had to start moving on.  I’d grown out of the immature humor and the friendly roughhousing. I was starting to lose interest in the subjects I had to focus on.  At first it was thought it might have been eyesight and a need for glasses (slightly clearer vision, but no real improvement), and then suggested maybe it was just immaturity and too much focus on frivolous things.  No one in the area had any idea what ADHD was, so that wasn’t even brought up.  It wasn’t until a few years into my high school years that it wasn’t any of this — it was a much simpler issue.

I was bored.

Added to the fact that I was seen as a student of intellect when I was younger, why was I slacking off now?  It was because I was confined.  I didn’t figure it out right away, but I knew something was there.  I was smart, I just hated to be confined to an education track that was too slow for me.  Why did I not say anything at the time?  Well, even that was confining.  Expectations, really.  As a kid I was all too willing to do what was expected of me.  Call it Catholic guilt, call it not wanting to rock the boat.  There were all sorts of rasons.

But really — it was all becoming old hat.  Stuck being the goody two shoes out of honor and expectation.  Wanting to strike out and doing something completely unique and unexpected of me.

But what?

* – This story was also inspired by the Cold War-themed music out there at the time.  Music was a huge inspiration for my writing even then.  My writing attempts actually started earlier, around 1980 or so, with at least a dozen ideas that were fleshed out in my head but never expanded upon.

** – I should also mention that Chris and I are related distantly, which was part of our impetus for meeting.  I’m not entirely sure of the connection, but I believe his grandfather and my grandfather were cousins or something like that.

*** – I was one of the youngest kids in the neighborhood growing up, so I was usually the annoying tag-along kid brother.

I was thinking the other day about how all our musical heroes, however big or small, have passed away in the last few months…Prince, Bowie, Lemmy, Maurice White, etc…and even in the past few decades, like Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, George Harrison, and so on.  It’s sad and it bothers us when they leave our realm.

At the same time, however, I started thinking just how incredibly lucky I am to have been there when they were huge.

So many important composers and songwriters over the centuries, performers and writers whose fame while they were alive took place well before we or even our grandparents were born.  Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, and so on.

One can only wonder what it was like to hear their most famous pieces when they premiered.  Pieces that are still known to us centuries later.

Me, I was born the year after the Beatles broke up so I never experience their chaotic live shows or the unveiling of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Sgt Pepper to a gobsmacked audience.  Or hearing “Hey Jude” the day it came out.  The closest I ever got was hearing “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love” as new songs during their Anthology documentary in 1995.

And yet…being a teenager in the 80s, I was there when MTV arrived.  I remember seeing the relatively new video for Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” and being floored by the nightmarish visuals.  Or the incredible hype behind the then unheard-of fifteen minute video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.  Or the unveiling of multiple charity songs in the mid 80s: Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, USA for Africa’s “We Are the World”, Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City”…hell, even Hear ‘n Aid’s “Stars”.  All those Big Famous Names in one room!

I was at college in Boston in the early 90s when grunge and Britpop were insanely huge, and got to see Radiohead’s very first US show on Lansdowne Street.  I got to meet Robyn Hitchcock during a college radio presser.  During my HMV years I got to go to a few meet n’ greets with various bands, and got to see many more live.  And I met a few musicians in the store itself.  And over the last few years my wife and I have been going to Outside Lands, where we’ve seen a ridiculous amount of great bands.  This year’s line-up plans to be absolutely amazing.

Do I feel sorrow when my favorite musicians pass away?  I suppose in a way I do…I’ve never been one to completely fall apart, and there is that quite sobering realization that this musician won’t be around anymore to write or record anything else.  Their oeuvre has a finite end, and we fans are loath to admit that will ever happen.

I feel absolutely blessed that I live in a time where I’ve been entertained by so many creative minds in the last thirty-plus years.  Absolutely fucking blessed.  These are the creators that have inspired me, entertained me, and made my life that much happier.

So to all the musicians living or passing in 2016:  I thank you from the bottom of my heart.